It’s almost an unlucky break for Sports Illustrated—and the authors of what will go down in sportswriting history as “the deer antler spray story”—that Ray Lewis is in the Super Bowl.

Otherwise, he might not have been the major factor to take away from what exploded from SI’s website and rained all over New Orleans on Tuesday.

If he wasn’t in the Super Bowl, the headline would have been “Ray Lewis—Sucker!” not “Ray Lewis—Cheater!”

And not just Lewis, though. All the other NFL players, and NFL assistants and ex-head coaches, and—as described at the very beginning of the story—players on the Alabama football team that won the 2012 BCS national championship game.

The story itself, about a shady outfit called Sports With Alternatives to Steroids (SWATS) and the two even-more-shady characters who run it, doesn’t explicitly claim Lewis ingested a banned substance this season to recover from his torn triceps. The dots are there to be connected, yes. The reported story, the SWATS guys’ version and Lewis’s version definitely don’t mesh. The questions Lewis has faced since Tuesday are fair to raise.

All of that is irrelevant to the larger point that came from the story:

Athletes will take anything to gain an edge, to negate a disadvantage, to stay on the field or prolong a career. And they are willing to believe anything they’re told about any product, and believe in anyone who tells them what they want to hear.

They’re suckers. And there is no end to con men available to prey on their desires.

The article names a bunch that, it appears, were preyed on, some to the point of endorsing them on the SWATS website: former Raiders head coach Hue Jackson, former baseball all-star Johnny Damon, veteran NFL lineman Richard Seymour, Pro Bowl linebacker Shawne Merriman, wrestler Bill Goldberg, champion golfer Vijay Singh.

It’s not a BALCO-level lineup. But, to be fair, BALCO products apparently worked. This stuff that SWATS spread around? Good luck proving any of it does what it’s advertised to do.

And pray that the stuff is only benign and worthless. What athletes are randomly spraying, shooting, rubbing or chugging from various sources could kill them. It could do nothing more than quench their thirst. It might give them powerful intestinal discomfort.

The effect could be anything in between—and the science behind it all could be just as varied in credibility. Heck, the credibility of the person peddling it to them could be all over the map, too.

Lewis alluded to that Wednesday in New Orleans, his second day of testimony on behalf of his own innocence. Of Mitch Ross and Christopher Keys, the pair slinging the deer-antler spray and the hologram chips and the rest of the SWATS inventory backlog, Lewis said they had “no credibility.” And were “cowards.” And were, in some shape or form, “the devil.”

Yes, it comes off as boilerplate athlete-denial on performance-enhancing drugs. Then again … how much credibility do any of the products and schemes being pushed by those two, according to the story, even have to enhance performance?

The story picked apart pretty much every claim Ross and Keys made. The hologram chips, the light beams, the radio waves, the negatively charged water, the manipulation of cell-phone frequencies—to borrow a phrase from a quote by Auburn University scientist David Pascoe, the Sports Illustrated story was essentially a print version of the TV show “Myth Busters.”

As for what is either the savior of Lewis’ career or the bane of his existence, the deer-antler spray, what the story didn’t completely de-bunk, was effectively buried by a pair of medical experts quoted on the Baltimore Sun’s website. The supposedly meaningful hormone—IGF-1, banned by the NFL and other organizations—isn’t plentiful enough in the spray to actually work, and can’t be delivered well enough to make a difference, the report said.

The report also pointed out that the only way it could be detected is in a blood test, which the NFL does not conduct; the same goes, of course, for human growth hormone, to which this hormone is connected and for which the NFL still does not test. So much for Lewis’ defense, that he has never failed an NFL drug test. Nice try, though.

Whether deer-antler spray or any of the other snake-oil products being pushed all over this country and the world to desperate athletes actually does things like heal torn triceps in record time, is unclear.

What is clear, however, is that a lot of athletes believe it does.

If they want it or need it badly enough, they will take anybody’s word for it—especially other athletes, even if those others are being hoodwinked, too. Who is out there to screen it all and protect them from the likes of Keys and Ross? Nobody, because to this day, the supplement world is the Wild Wild West, unregulated and under little control.

The story illustrates that the athletes—whether college kids, retiring future Hall of Famers or head coaches—don’t even know what they don’t know. Unless they took advanced chemistry courses in college, are they supposed to know that there is no such thing as “negatively charged water”? Why wouldn’t a concept like harvesting the hormones that help deer antlers grow fast sound plausible?

All of that is about a million times scarier, and more disturbing, than whether the most polarizing figure at the Super Bowl has committed an additional polarizing act.

Tough luck for this story, and the meaning that’s now been lost. Lewis might have cheated. He might have lied. Or he might simply have joined the biggest fraternity in sports: the vulnerable, duped, desperate athlete.